Mergers & Acquisitions

A merger or acquisition can be a long, arduous task -- one that requires significant focus on the details of the combination, often to the detriment of day-to-day operations.

West Monroe Partners has significant experience helping many organizations -- both buyers and sellers, including private equity firms, holding or portfolio organizations, consolidators, investment banks, and venture capital firms -- with key merger- or acquisition-related activities.

Our approach integrates the vital elements of people, process, strategy, and technology to ensure a smooth start-up or seamless integration. Our services include:

IT and operational due diligence

There are many factors that determine the ultimate success of an acquisition. One of the most important--but often underestimated--is the ability of the systems to support the critical business processes that enable rapid growth or to integrate with other companies' processes, data and systems while maintaining business as usual. West Monroe Partners has an efficient and comprehensive approach for conducing pre-acquisition IT due diligence that looks at factors such as value in intellectual property, process and technology compatibility between organizations -- IT and operations teams and procedures, presence of obsolete software, system or process inefficiencies or incompatibilities, or employee retention issues. We have advised on more than 150 private equity and corporate transactions by performing IT, operational, process, people, change management, customer, market, and strategic due diligence.

Pre- and post-transaction services

We assist both buyers and sellers with a range of pre- and post-transaction services. In addition to IT and operational due diligence services, our pre-transaction services include preparing IT environments for sale, defining carve-out business requirements, incorporating IT input in offering memoranda, and defining transition services agreements (TSAs). Post-transaction services include executing on the operational and IT aspects of carve-outs, roll-ups, integrations, and migrations.

Portfolio company services

We provide business process, operations, functional, and IT advice and execution of specific projects for private equity or holding company portfolio businesses. Our solutions include strategies for obtaining synergies across a portfolio of companies by identifying opportunities for such synergies, such as implementing shared services in areas such as finance/accounting, procurement, HR/benefits, and IT. We also work with clients to execute sell-side readiness IT projects to prepare for divestiture and to facilitate investment banking representation and marketability. 

Investment reporting and portfolio management

One of the most arduous tasks that investment firms face is reporting on their investments to both internal and external sources.  We help many prominent private equity groups with investment and portfolio reporting for their holdings, a process required for internal, lender, and limited partners (LPs).  This includes improving data gathering, submission and aggregation, analysis of financial and operational performance, trending, metrics, and benchmarking, reporting, and distribution of the periodic updates on performance of the investments, the portfolio, or the fund.   Our clients range from companies that typically rely on programs such as Excel to manage investments to those with sophisticated fund of funds analysis needs.  We help improve portfolio management capabilities by selecting and implementing portfolio management and reporting software (such as our own hosted West Monroe Partners Investment Reporting™ solution, which utilizes XBRL standards to standardize and simplify the reporting process) or developing custom software that works exclusively for you. Either way, we can help to make your portfolio management processes more responsive to your business.

Deal and relationship management

In addition to the customized solutions we’ve built for many private equity groups around investments, we also have designed and implemented state-of-the-art deal tracking and CRM (contact and customer relationship management) solutions for some of the nation’s most prominent private equity groups. In addition to helping our clients select and implement, or build customized solutions to manage the complex deal cycle and their extensive networks of business contacts, we also work on expense management systems related to deal prospecting and portfolio company administration and integration with the private equity groups’ internal financial and accounting systems.

New venture support

If your future strategy includes new ventures -- whether through start-ups or combinations -- we can provide a variety of activities to support your strategy. Our experienced professionals can assist in many ways -- developing a business case, defining technology architecture to bring the strategy to life, creating a proof of concept, or conceptualizing a new product strategy.

Altogether, West Monroe Partners has performed the work described above across more than 150 distinct projects and for dozens of prominent and innovative private equity firms. Please contact us for our specific credentials in this area.

Contact us for more information about enterprise solutions.

Read Due Diligence: Risk Mitigation or Opportunity Identification, featured in Mergers & Acquisitions